MBA Or PSD... Which One You Need To Succeed In Life...#MirMak

MBA Or PSD... Which One You Need To Succeed In Life...#MirMak

Entrepreneurship Competitions everywhere these days..As a matter of fact I attended one just this past weekend. Great effort by the students in putting it all together. Great entertainment. Amazingly charged crowd. Excellent photo opportunity to be seen or to see. Good presentations, Great Research and analysis of the markets and its opportunities, but the end result ? Rarely will you find any business developing out of these competitions. Its all a waste of time and effort.
Why ? Because we are not teaching our youth to become
businessmen. we are teaching them to develop business plans, win competitions, get shields. make your Deans and Professors happy and go home thinking that you are on your way to becoming an Entrepreneur. We are teaching them to review case studies of businesses that are already successful without teaching them about the efforts and the mental tenacity of the people or the person who made that business successful. We are not showing them how many times that entrepreneur failed and how he dealt with the failures to become successful. Rather we are teaching them about how to raise Funding for their ideas. The entire effort is put on raising funds. Nothing else. Team does not matter to them, mental preparation to become a successful businessman has no meaning, paying your dues has no consequences, the only thing that is being taught is the love of money. As a matter of fact, the word "ENTREPRENEUR" has been used and abused more by Non-French speaking world than the French themselves. It has a good sound to it, doesnt it ? It sounds CHIC and Current in every gathering. Its a great word to describe yourself without having to expose your inner abilities. What do you do ? Well, I am an "Entrepreneur". And the other person is already impressed.
This entire method of teaching people to become businessmen is like back in the old days when our parents forced us to become doctors or engineers. Because it was CHIC. Understand one thing, not all of you HAVE to become businessmen. You can be a great employee and do great for yourself. Do not do your MBA just for the sake of becoming a businessman. MBA's do not teach you how to become a businessman. It teaches you to study other businessmen's strategies and case studies and think that you can become successful by just doing that. If that was the case, the entire MBA Graduating class of the world would have started one successful business after another and the world would have had a shortage of employees and an abundance of founders. That is not the case and it will never be. Being a businessman has more to do with training your mind than to sit in a classroom and think you can conquer the world. No MBA course in this world, may it be Harvard or Yale or Stanford or even LUMS teaches you about how to handle adversity in life while in the process of becoming a businessman. Entrepreneurship is about making sacrifices in that early part of your life when your other fellow graduates are having fun and enjoying their salaries after graduation. Its about paying the dues and willing to live hand to mouth even after having money in the company account because you have other people's salaries to pay. Its about making yourself count LAST and everybody and everything else FIRST.
So much emphasis is being put on getting good grades that our students are more worried about grades than about actual learning. Straight A's are no guarantee of future success. Even your degree is not a guarantee that you will succeed, for that matter. Long time ago i realized that i would rather work with what i call, a PSD than to work with a bookish MBA and no tenacity of mind. PSD ? Yes a PSD. A POOR SMART and DEDICATED young man. POOR because it will give him hunger for success and he has seen the difficulties of life already. SMART because he will never go back to his poor life because he will do everything smartly to avoid what he grew up with. DEDICATED because to get away from poverty, smartly, he needs dedication constantly. I came to this conclusion when i was firing a Harvard MBA from my firm for the first time. Because i was overpaying him, he was under contributing compared to others but he had that attitude that he was better than others because he had graduated from Harvard University. A good University should tech you humility not arrogance. Because humility is also one of the prerequisites to succeeding in life, not only business. The bigger the university in its status, the bigger the student's ego these days. And this MIGHTIER THAN THOU attitude prevents them from starting any small business. They want $50 million dollar funding right from the beginning. They want to capture the world with 10 million customers in the very next year and a net worth of $3 billion and the stock opening up on NASDAQ or NYSE with 20 times over subscription.
So all of you NON MBA's and NON IVY LEAGUE graduates, do not feel that you are less than anybody else. And all the would be businessmen of our future Pakistan, do not give up on your dreams because you could not find funding and were criticized by some judges in some Entrepreneurship Competition. Start small, start from your neighbourhood. Keep your idea simple. Use common sense and provide a service, a new one or an old one better than the old way. And do not feel bad that your parents could not pay for your MBA... Consider that a blessing and promise yourself that you WILL succeed and do everything in your power and beyond to succeed. Begin to embrace IMPOSSIBILITIES because it is always IMPOSSIBLE until it is done. How about you becoming THE ONE who does the impossible FIRST ?